The Final Destination

Only 13,000 feet more to go. I have the distinct feeling that I’ll reach the summit on April 21. But shortly after writing these lines with such evident confidence, a fierce Himalayan storm broke out. The severe weather conditions put paid to his plans of going further up the mountain, and he was compelled to go down. And so, he descended to a lower level. But after this, it was not in his fate to be able to move up the mountain again. No one really knows what happened to him then, but a year later, when Tenzing Norgay was heading up Mt. Everest, he found Maurice Wilson’s corpse, and with it, his diary, the last entry in which were the sentences quoted above. Maurcie Wilson planned to take a picture of himself atop Mt. Everest with his camera. It, he had hoped, would capture his moment of victory. But his time came before that could happen. There was no Maurice Wilson left whose victory his camera could show to the world! This, in a sense, is the same story of every one of us. Everyone thinks that he is advancing towards the Mt. Everest of success, whereas the reality is just the opposite. In actual fact, everyone is heading towards a destination where there will be no one to welcome him other than death. In this world, some people only nurse the desire for worldly success, but they have not even set off on the journey to their dream-world when death grabs them. Others manage to attain, to greater or lesser extent, the objects of their desire. Yet, this does not give them